Silent Words

This is one of my favorite photos...and it has captured one of my life's memorable moments...:) With my students: Asmita (in Green Top), Sujita and my friend HK 

Scripting the Unwritten: ‘Little’ History in Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History Recently the novelists from Nepal have moved from key events in the history of the nation to focus on those that may not have made a global impact. Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History is an example at hand.   The Tutor of History , a story of poor and downtrodden people is a subalternist critique of Nepali politics and history. The characters drawn in the book are from the grass root level where they run an unnoticed life between hope and frustration. By presenting the bleak life of ordinary people, Manju is redrawing the boundaries of history through marginal landscape. So, the text is a history of subalterns who lived during 1990s and remained unnoticed in Nepali history written academically. To prove this hypothesis, this paper will draw basic insights from Deepesh Chakravarty, Ranjit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault and Hayden White [1] . [1] I will be taking basic insights of ...

Reports of governmental and non-governmental agencies present a very appalling picture of child labor in Nepal. There are thousands of children—I call them ‘forgotten children’—working as domestic workers hidden behind mansion walls. These are the children who experience little or no childhood at all. Leela is a ten-years-old servant in one of the houses in Kathmandu. Every morning at 5:30 she gets up, trudges out to a nearby public tap to fetch water for her master's household, sweeps the yard and then prepares tea for the whole family. Then she helps prepare the family’s meals, runs errands and washes dishes and clothes. When the whole family has taken the meals, then only she can have her turn. If something goes wrong from her side, she is beaten and even tortured. Leela is one of the most forgotten children, a domestic worker hidden behind mansion walls. Like her, thousands of children are exploited in our societies. With a dream of a bright future, these kids are sent by ...

“Shame shame, you weep like a girl,” my parents used to tease me whenever I wept during my childhood days.  I was told that a boy should not shed tears. That is not a ‘masculine’ quality. So, I used to control myself because I did not want to be ‘feminine’. I was taught that stoicism and self-restraint are masculine qualities and that men should always be careful not to be guided by emotions as it debilitated the masculine traits in men. Those lessons I was indoctrinated during my childhood days made deep impact in my world view. Gradually as I grew up, I became careful not to do anything that was ‘feminine’. I learned to climb the trees, played volleyballs and even changed my way of speaking and dressing up. (I still remember how I tried hard to emulate Amir Khan’s style in  Rangeela ). When I passed my eighth class, we were offered to choose between two subjects--optional mathematics and economics in class nine. I instantly chose mathematics because 'doing mathematics' was...

Violence is ubiquitous now. It seems we are living in a violent time. Every day, when we go through newspaper or turn on the TV news channels, we see mostly the news of violence and of death. Every day, many innocent people are being killed for no good cause. Kidnapping, extortion, intimidation and rape have become common things. But, I am haunted by a childish seeming question: why is there violence?  The same childish question had haunted many intellectuals for centuries. They tried to go to the root cause of violence. Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud claimed that violence is inherent in human nature. Freud argued, humans have two drives inherently in them--death and love. The same death drive leads to violence. However, this view is countered by the French Enlightenment thinkers who assert that man is good by nature. It is the social circumstance that corrupts him and incites to do violence. Violence is learned.  Man (I am using 'man' in sex neutral sense) by nature is no...